Over the next month, Sightlines will explore the increasing importance of new beverage alcohol consumers and the value of better understanding changes across drinkers’ gender identities and age ranges. If you’d like to continue to read our reporting on this topic, you can subscribe to Sightlines+, a subscription newsletter from Good Beer Hunting that provides weekly insights and analysis on the alcohol industry. Monthly and annual subscription options are available.
There is no more important narrative in the last century of U.S. alcohol than the rise of women drinkers. Men once outnumbered women drinkers three-to-one for Americans born around 1900. Today, the National Institutes of Health show those numbers are approaching parity.
In the 88 years since Prohibition ended, women have gradually closed the wide gap that once existed between their consumption of alcohol and that of men. In 2019, for the first time in U.S. history, women made up the majority of alcohol consumers under the age of 25. It’s largely a “story of empowerment,” says research analyst Bourcard Nesin, and it’s filled with chapters on how women have gained more influence as consumers as they’ve excelled in higher education; taken on new careers; and embraced their buying power in stores, restaurants, and bars.
This defining storyline of what’s changing in beverage alcohol isn’t based on the trajectory of “craft,” the proliferation of hard seltzers, or a global pandemic. Instead, the seismic rise of women drinkers has become a major factor in the business of alcohol, and reflects women’s growing equality and the lasting impact they’ll leave on the industry.
As we begin 2022, women are nearly as likely as men to consume alcohol. It’s a startling contrast from the early 20th century, when segments of society were panicked that women were being rendered “coarse and immodest, unfit for marriage” as “the drink habit is growing among women.” But our modern understanding of equality hasn’t translated into equal decision-making power for women within the industry, which continues to be focused on men—and run by them, too.
On the whole, women are attaining higher levels of education than ever before, and have been outpacing men in their attainment of post-secondary degrees for decades, now earning about 58% of bachelor’s degrees in the U.S., as well as a higher percentage of master’s (60.7%) and doctorate (54.1%) degrees.
Women have also increased their earning power. Younger women workers are even closing the stubborn gender wage gap, though men are still paid more than women. In 2020, women ages 25-34 earned, on average, 93 cents to every $1 a man in the same age group attained. That’s up from 67 cents in 1980. For all workers, it’s estimated that a 16-cent pay gap last year was down from a difference of 36 cents that existed 40 years ago.
All these factors—more income, higher levels of education, and greater career advancement—are associated with increased alcohol consumption: Gallup polling found that 80% of adults with a college degree report drinking alcohol, while only 52% of adults with a high school degree or less do.
“Unfortunately, more women in bars doesn’t always lead to more women in the boardroom at alcohol companies,” Nesin, who provides analysis of beverage markets for banking and financial services company Rabobank, wrote in a December 2020 report.
Consequently, brands too often treat women drinkers as an enigma, or as an afterthought. As new generations in the U.S. reach legal drinking age with greater proportions of women alcohol consumers than ever before—and as those generations are more racially and ethnically diverse —why and how to address women as consumers will be a make-or-break consideration for companies.
But first, addressing what women drinkers want in the 21st century must begin with a critical reexamination of what the term “women drinkers” even assumes.
If the belief that gender is a binary is declining among younger generations—the most important demographic for beverage alcohol—the idea of setting women drinkers apart as their own marketing category presents a challenge. Instead, it’s time to rethink and broaden the ideas and expectations of what it means to sell alcohol to anyone. This is a do-or-die consideration as newly legal-age drinkers in the U.S. are increasingly critical of traditional ideas about gender, and reject the idea that certain types of alcohol are “ideal” for specific genders.
Gender essentialism—the belief that a person’s gender is linked to physical biology and is static—is falling out of favor, especially among millennials and Gen Z, which represent people ages 18-39. Members of those generations were most likely to see gender roles and the gender binary as outdated, according to a 2020 survey of 2,000 U.S. adults conducted by advertising insights agency Bigeye.
Alcohol marketers can no longer treat gender the same way they historically have and remain relevant. Ads from as recently as 2010 (Svedka’s “sexy fembot” commercials, featuring a sexualized, dancing feminine robot) and 2003 (Miller Lite’s “Catfight” ads, which begin with a riff on the brand’s decades-old tagline of “great taste, less filling” before devolving into a wet T-shirt wrestling match between two women) already seem like artifacts of a bygone time.
Instead, Coors Light’s “remarkable” 2019 commercial, promoting it as the “Official Beer of Being Done Wearing a Bra,” earned positive publicity and has been part of a resurgence for that beer, which has had its best two-year stretch of sales in five years. Since launching the “Made to Chill” campaign, of which the bra ad was a part, Coors Light has seen an uptick in sales among women consumers, as well as younger legal-age drinkers and people of color.
“The bra ad has probably become the most iconic of that first set of spots, because beer had never spoken to women in that way. Women were never the central figures [of beer commercials]; they were accessories or background stories,” Molson Coors Beverage Company’s chief marketing officer Michelle St. Jacques said via email. “The bra ad not only heroed a woman by herself at the end of a long work day, but it also celebrated an insight that most women—and in fact, many men—could relate to.”
This ad resonated with younger women and men because of changing notions about gender roles. The oldest members of Gen Z turned 21 between 2017 and 2019, and millennials have been of legal drinking age for more than a decade. These generations are squarely in the period of developing their lifelong relationships to alcohol—and they’re doing so with a much more fluid view of gender than past generations.
A July 2021 study by the Williams Institute, a University of California Los Angeles research center focused on sexual orientation and gender identity, was the first of its kind to estimate the population of non-binary LGBTQ people living in the U.S.
It found that 1.2 million LGBTQ people identify their gender as non-binary, meaning somewhere outside of or between the male-female binary.
This represents 11% of the total U.S. LGBTQ population ages 18-60.
The same study found that more than 75% of those who identify as non-binary are young, between 18 and 29 years old.
This matters for marketers, who will be able to reach a wider net of legal drinking-age consumers with less-traditional gender-based marketing. Younger people think about gender in a less essentialist way, so messaging that reflects that is more likely to resonate with a greater pool of drinkers.
Even among cisgender people (those whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth), gender is increasingly mutable. The 2020 Bigeye survey found 52% agreed with something other than a traditional, binary definition of gender, a percentage that’s highest among millennial respondents.
The Bigeye survey found that half of respondents of all generations believe they personally conform to the stereotype that men are tough-skinned and women are sensitive.
Research by data analytics and brand consulting company Kantar presented at the Brewbound Live conference in November 2021 found that 54% of Gen Z (compared to 46% of the general population) believe that “challenging traditional stereotypes for your age or gender” is extremely or very important.
If a sizable number of Americans believe gender doesn’t determine personality or preferences—or even remain fixed throughout our lives—then why should we even address women drinkers as a category? Because when decisions take into account preferences associated with women drinkers, they likely appeal to other, non-women consumers, too.
As women have increased as a proportion of drinkers, they’ve also increased as a proportion of people who binge drink and/or are diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. This uptick has led to coverage in national media outlets and hand-wringing and admonishment by some public health researchers. But putting this in context matters: With lower average weights and different ratios of muscle, fat, and water to men, the majority of women’s bodies process alcohol differently from men’s bodies. A blanket definition of “unhealthy drinking” for women is problematic, and it isn’t as useful at a time when sex and gender are decoupled in many people’s minds. Just as the Body Mass Index isn’t relevant to all bodies, neither are rigidly gendered notions of what constitutes healthy or unhealthy drinking. Better communication about how alcohol affects all bodies and people of all genders is critical.
In terms of health and alcohol marketing, gender matters—but in a nuanced way. Addressing product preferences that some women may have, as long as it’s not done in a pandering or overly gendered way, can also end up addressing product preferences that non-women drinkers have, too. Hard seltzers are a prime example: Companies originally marketed them almost exclusively to women, but realized the beverage had cross-gender appeal and abandoned their female focus. The actual demographic breakdown is a near-even 50/50 split between men and women.
“The whole nature of gender makes it so that there’s this gray zone where there’s a lot of men who want something and women who want something, and by acting to serve the women in that group, you unwittingly and wonderfully end up serving a whole bunch of men,” Nesin says.
Of course, this also works in reverse: Many women also want products or experiences traditionally marketed to men. Writer and award-winning homebrewer Mandy Naglich provided a prime example of this on Twitter, expressing frustration with a press release that described a beer subscription box as a good gift for men, instead of simply for beer lovers. Naglich wrote that she felt “sad,” because “it honestly feels like a pretty good gift… for me.” Like many other drinkers, Naglich doesn’t want to be told which gender a product is intended for—she’d rather make a choice about whether it’s an interesting product, period.
Nesin offers smaller serving sizes as another example of cross-gender marketing: A beer company might decide to introduce smaller cans of a product intended for women, but it would likely turn out that many male consumers would also appreciate another packaging size option. Workhorse Brewing Company in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, found success with its 8oz cans, telling SevenFiftyDaily that the “adorable” cans replicated the concept of beer flights, but in a retail store rather than a taproom.
“Marketers tend to think in that gender binary and heteronormative world, so when marketing to women directly, it will surprise them to learn that a lot of men don’t conform to traditional male steroetypes and therefore are going to be absolutely so relieved to see there’s a brand marketed to them, too,” Nesin says.
Beyond the product itself, language in beverage marketing is also due for a change that reflects gender fluidity. A panel discussion published by Punch explores this through the lens of wine, noting that “masculine,” “feminine,” “sexy,” “slutty,” “brosé,” and “mom wine” are all still common terms used in that sphere, but that there are significant calls from within wine to move away from such reductive vocabulary. Last year, spirits retailers, journalists, and brands denounced “Whiskey Bible” author Jim Murray for using sexist language to describe the sensory attributes of various whiskeys. Such language, as was the case in the example of the beer subscription box, turns off consumers and risks losing sales.
James Sligh, co-founder of virtual wine study group Industry Sessions, states in the discussion that when he sees wineries or writers describe wines in gendered terms, “It says a lot about who they imagined is a wine drinker.”
Rather than focusing on who a wine or other beverage is for, multiple Punch panelists suggest a new way forward: Describing how a beverage will make the drinker feel. Linking a product to a sensation or experience lessens the need for a drinker to identify as something, and is less likely to alienate them. It allows companies to move away from binary thinking and focus on shared experiences—they may see men and women as different in certain ways, but everyone can share emotional experiences or memories.
Darwin Acosta, a winemaking, vineyard, and hospitality assistant at Burgess Cellars and founder of Co-Fermented, an organization dedicated to awareness and representation of LGBTQIA+ identifying individuals in the wine industry, says during the discussion that wine marketing should seek to make an experience for the drinker that is memorable and tied to the wine itself—not gender expectations.
Memory and sensation are not only some of the most powerful reasons we love certain beverages; they can be anti-essentialist. Building conversations around what a particular beverage offers and why someone might like it opens up an entirely new way to connect with drinkers—one that has less to do with who they are than what they want.
Over the next month, Sightlines will explore the increasing importance of new beverage alcohol consumers and the value of better understanding changes across drinkers’ gender identities and age ranges. If you’d like to continue to read our reporting, you can subscribe to Sightlines+, a subscription newsletter from Good Beer Hunting that provides weekly insights and analysis on the alcohol industry. Monthly and annual subscription options are available.
Upcoming stories in this series:
Gen Z Factor — The Average Drinker Will Soon Be a Non-White Woman
In Their Prime — How Millennial and Gen X Women Became Today’s Most Powerful Alcohol Consumers
Golden Girls — What We Miss When We Pigeonhole Retired Women Drinkers
Words by Kate Bernot